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"Redefining Family" and the Becoming Americans Theme

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s publication “Becoming Americans” explores the lives of real colonial Virginian families and how they approached life passages such as courtship and marriage, birth, childhood, and death.

During the colonial era, the institution of family evolved as political developments changed relationships between blacks, whites, and Native Americans. Families had to adapt as new leaders and principles redefined the status of every man.

Diverse Peoples

Native Americans, Africans, and British
colonists held different cultural perceptions of the family. These
understandings underwent profound alterations in response to the
New World environment and in reaction to the other groups. The
highly abnormal demographic conditions of the 17th century
delayed and stunted the formation of family life, which was further
reshaped when whites imported Africans to labor on their plantations.
Encroaching settlement by Europeans and their slaves pushed the
Indians from their traditional homelands.

Clashing Interests

Most Europeans considered Native-American
family customs to be outlandish and debased. As patriarchal slave
masters, whites intervened profoundly often peremptorily in
the experience of their bondsmen imposed laws that
relegated African-Virginians status inferiors.

Some members of the gentry resisted
the changes that affected many families by the third quarter of
the eighteenth century. The friction between Landon Carter and
his son and daughter-in-law may be interpreted either as a generational
disagreement over family relations or as an expression of individual
preferences. At all times, variations in individuals' beliefs
about what a family should be added diversity to early Virginia
society.

Shared Values

Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans
all placed a high value on children, family relationships, and
kinship networks. As African-Virginians helped raise white children,
lived and worked in close proximity to whites, and interacted
with the master's family, accommodation between the races and
an unconscious exchange of values took place. Living in Williamsburg
could be a positive experience for both Sarah Trebell and her
family's slave, Eady. Black and white Williamsburg children had
some opportunity for schooling. After the Revolution, the adoption
of a more egalitarian sharing of authority began to set a standard
that was understood by all levels of society and is still perceived
as important today.

Formative Institutions

While white masters began to accept
the importance of slave families, neither the law nor the church
sanctioned slave marriages. Legislation enforced the moral teachings
of the Anglican church regarding acceptable social behavior and
the treatment of dependents such as apprentices, servants, and
slaves. Education was regarded as the chief means to pass one
society's values and rules on to the next generation. The home
was the unchallenged center for education, religious learning,
and spiritual development.

Partial Freedoms

The gentry enjoyed more freedom in
their family relationships by 1770, but these changing attitudes
had no effect on slave families. Nor were they experienced in
all white families, or even in all upper-class families. For example,
although both husband and wife recognized the woman's role in
a family, their lives continued to be narrowly defined and they
were seldom educated to reach their full potential. The black
family experience continued to lack stability. The opportunity
for most black children in Williamsburg to receive some formal
education faded when the Bray School closed its doors at the death
of Ann Wager. A few masters such as George Wythe occasionally
taught individual slaves to read. Few slave families responding
to Dunmore's Proclamation gained their freedom. Native-American
families continued to be confined to reservations in the East
or were pushed to the limits of the frontier in the West.

Revolutionary Promise

Even before the Revolution, changes
in white family values and experiences heralded transformations.
Those families with skills, material goods, and knowledge of the
appropriate behaviors increased their opportunities for social
mobility. Racism and lack of opportunity meant that Native-American
and slave families' full participation in the new republic remained
an unfulfilled promise. A few slaves such as "Saul, the property
of George Kelly Esquire," whose petition was brought before
the 1792 Virginia Assembly were granted freedom for service to
the Revolutionary cause. Virginia law recognized that some marriages
were not successful, so limited divorce became available here
and also in the rest of the nation. After the war, educating children
to participate in the new republic contributed to the optimistic
expectations for the United States. The transformed white American
family became a cornerstone of the American character.